Slashdot Mirror
Brine on Mars?
Bagels writes "A new article on MSNBC (coming originally from Space.com) reports that the both Rovers may have struck water in the form of brine. The Opportunity rover found hints of salty water in the trench that it dug, and scientists note that the Spirit rover is currently digging a trench of its own to investigate the soil that clings to its treads, suggesting the possibility of moisture. The brine would only be small amounts of water mixed with salt, which can exist in liquid form at very low temperatures. More images are available over at NASA's rover site." Reader
frovingslosh would like to add: "I'm just hoping that when you get around to posting one of the many stories that the rover has found mud on Mars that you might include a link to the slashdot article where I predicted this but got moderated as 'funny'." Done!
Scientists now believe that advanced colonies of Sea Monkeys once inhabited Mars.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
...there's shrimp!
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I believe this is obvious proof that Mars used to have oceans. Yes, oceans. And because they had oceans, they had life. And because they had life, they had Elephants. Only they weren't called Elephants. They were called Marlaphants.
Yeah, Marlaphants.
Anyone taking bets?
clifgriffin > blog
Jokes, aside, let's not forget that this could house some microbial life, at the very least. Just look at our ocean's seabed around the vents.
Hey George, Mars called, and they're running out of shrimp!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
No, the ice caps have been known to be largely water ice for a while now. There was another story confirming it a few weeks ago. The real news here is liquid water.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
And so begins the great Martian Salt Trade.
..why did it not evaporate?
The atmospheric pressure on mars is pretty low, which means that any liquid water (which this apparently is) will be vacuum dried to gas and move into outer space.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Here's a New Scientist article from January which argues for the presence of brine.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Now there will be salt mines for the riff-raff when I take over Mars.
--- Ban humanity.
Maybe it's leftover salt from Martian civilizations de-icing their driveways...
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
Rover is picking up hints of Martian Cities made entirely of Gold off in the distance. Spanish mercenaries, get ready!
My guess, one of these days one of the Mars rovers will stumble on upon Bikini Bottom, and be treated to the whimsical antics of SpongeBob, Patrick, Plankton, and Squidward. Come on, there's no space helmet wearing sassy squirrels like Sandy on earth. If there were, would I be sitting here typing?
This would be much much more exciting if they found spice.
:)
Other rover was actually taken by a sand worm.
In other news, new rovers will roll without rhythm.
The parent is right; the "+5 informative" grandparent is just wrong. We have known for some time that at least the north polar cap was composed mostly of water ice.
r _040123.html
References:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030210/030210-9.html
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/express_wate
I hope they rust-proofed the Rovers.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
No need to thank me, just not doing my (real) job.
If you dig a trench in the sand and find salty water, you should start running because the tide is gonna come in any minute!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Stop the importation of Martian Dihydrogen Monoxide now! It's threatening the Earth's Dihydrogen Monoxide industry!
This raises the possiblities of halophiles living on Mars. On Earth, halophiles can live in up to 35% salt solutions. Pure water would kill these creatures --causing them to aborb water until they burst.
Its no wonder that Viking found no clear evidence of life on Mars, the low-salt water in Viking's nutirent broth probably killed any halophiles.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Brine? Brine means pickles? Pickles means Mars was (or still is) inhabited by a highly evolved race of cucumbers? Earthlings eat huge quantities of pickles on burgers? Meaning McDonald's could be considered a weapon of mass destruction? So now Mars will declare war, great, this is just what the economy needs...
"The very small particle size of Martian dust makes it likely that it sticks due to static charge. If the soil were moisture laden you would expect it to rapidly dry out and crust over (change appearance) on the wheels of the rover."
No. The amount they are talking about causing this is much much smaller than the amount it would require to saturate it to the point of an observable change in appearance after exposure.
It may even be the result of no water in it now but the result of residual salts left behind by existance of water at some point. Theoretically this could display these properties as well.
So now we know where all those pickled odities you find in redneck bars come from. I knew those things floating in brine must have come from another planet.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I think they should take a picture at night so we can see what Mars' moons look like.
Rather than having the rovers scratch the surface or look at billion year old craters what they should do is send a large lump of heavy metal (say, 500 lbs) to Mars and, with it protected by a heat shield, slam it into the surface like an meteorite. Not having to account for parachute wind drift they could be pretty accurate with such a targeted blow and the result would be a small -fresh- crater. The crater could be observed by sensors in orbit and a rover landed in the vicinity shortly thereafter. Both the man-made meteorite and the rover could be sent together and initially orbited so as to allow time for a precise hit and accurate rover reentry.
======= ~\_/~\_O Burmese
Deimos and Phobos, while closer (23459 and 9378 km) to Mars than Luna is to Earth (about 384400 km), also have much smaller masses (1.8e15 and1.08e16 kg) than Luna (7.35e22 kg). [source]
Tidal forces (being a function of gravitational differential) are an inverse-cube function on distance, and linear with mass, so that would be a tidal force about 1/99th that of which we're used to. (Disclaimer: I am not a Physicist, but I share a house with one.)
While this is Mars, the concern isn't completely insane. If the rover's in position to get a 1% response from the Martian equivalent of the Bay of Fundy, we'll be needing yet another Mars probe, and someone at NASA should be needing a new job for putting it there.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I keep seeing references in the rover news about the microscopic imager, but is this really a microscope, or is it just magnifying as much as say a desktop macroscope for opaque objects (they let you see things around the size of a hair okay..? If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them? It is impossible for the layman to look at the closeups we've been seeing and understand how big the field is.
Hasn't anyone else noticed this?
The mars face has returned!
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Maybe... just maybe, Mars was similar to Earth some-umpteen-billion years ago. And Earth will be like Mars in some-umpteen-billion years.
I'm willing to take an entreprenurial risk and say we're overlooking the real moneymaker here... and that's Venus... once Earth moves out of this cushy orbit, Venus is going to move in. A couple billions years after that... Hot Venutian Chicks on my beaches.
awwwYEAH.
Indeed, I've found an abstract from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on the subject.
Right.
m l.
The brine speculation is coming from people not involved on the project, which space.com is reporting uncritically. The news conference where the project scientists are presenting their information mention nothing about brine.
See the entry for Thursday, February 19, 2004 at http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.ht
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
You stick a couple of 100 million dollars worth of water detecting apparatus aboard a rover, and how do you eventually find the wet stuff? Right, it sticks to the tires...
Doh!
signs of life on Mars, and since it's likely that (being scientists) some of them are Monty Python fans, I humbly submit that the project should be called...
"The Life of Brine".
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
That means that NASA can start putting cool mudflaps on future rovers. You know, those flaps with the naked ladies on 'em? R-r-r-r-r baby!
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
What happens if the rover DOES find water? Would it sink or would it float? Logic dictates that if it floats, it is therfore a witch and must be burned.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
They BOTH found it? Maybe the rovers are just leaking some of their antifreeze?
Gases do move into outer space. Gravity slows down the process, but it doesn't stop it. When you get to the outer atmosphere, the velocity of gas atoms and molecules follow a predictable statistical distribution, dependent on their atomic mass and average temperature. Many atoms and molecules will reach escape velocity, and diffuse away from the planet. What do you think happened to the atmospheric helium on Earth?
Molecular weight of helium: 4
Molecular weight of water: 18
Gases escape over geologic time if the mean particle velocity is more than about a tenth escape velocity (if I recall correctly). Light particles at a given temperature (defined by average particle kinetic energy) move faster and so are lost more readily. Heavier particles are moving more slowly, and so are lost at a _much_ slower rate (the tail of the Boltzman distribution is exponential).
The real reason Mars has relatively little water is that water is broken up in the upper atmosphere by interaction with solar UV. While water may not be light enough to escape, hydrogen definitely is (molecular weight 2, and weight of an atomic hydrogen radical formed by a UV event is 1). This mechanism works on all of the planets (especially the inner ones) to strip their atmospheres of hydrogen.
Mars has a less active geology than Earth. We get hydrogen compounds (including water) replenished from volcanic sources. Earth also has a much higher escape velocity, which means that hydrogen is lost less quickly when formed (and has longer to recombine to form chemicals with higher molecular weight).
Both of these help explain why Earth is wet and Mars isn't. On the short term, however, water stays bound in Mars's atmosphere just fine. Those ice caps that migrate seasonally via atmospheric gas transport aren't all CO2, you know.
You can find a number of documents online discussing why Venus did get stripped of most of its water, despite being heavy and having a fairly active geology.